When I was eight years old in the summer of 1963, I lived in a small town in southern New Jersey called Magnolia. It was a sleepy little town that looked like it came right out of the 19th century. It would have been the perfect location to film "The Music Man", if anybody had taken notice of it. There wasn't much of it beyond an intersection with a railroad track and small, wooden train station. On one corner, there was a deli called, "Nick's and John's". I loved the smell of that place. The floorboards were worn down to the bare wood and hadn't seen a shellacking in thirty years or more. I also remember a large, wooden pickle barrel filled to the top with dills floating in brine and absolutely nothing was better than their vanilla ice cream!
On the other side of the street was a bakery and a barber shop with a twirling, red and white pole topped by a golden globe. The only style you could get there was a crew-cut or, what we kids called, a "white-wall". With this kind of haircut, at least they left something on top. You knew what you were going to get because of the sun-faded photographs that were scotch-taped to the display window near the front door. It was a torture to get a haircut back then and it was even worse if your friends found out and bicycled their way to the shop just in time to watch you getting "buzzed" through that plate-glass, picture window. The torture of sitting there with that electric clipper eating around your ears was nothing to what you could expect from your friends when you walked out the door. It was the long admired tradition of "beeswacks" and "swatzies" - that horrible gauntlet of getting smacked in the freshly cut back of the head and then grabbed in a head-lock and suffering through the meanest Indian burn your buddies could muster. The only consolation was in knowing that they'd get theirs the next time they got buzzed. It all equaled out, in the end.
My best friend, Bobby walked into my kitchen through the back door while I was having breakfast one Saturday morning. After saying "hey, Mrs. G." to my Mom, he sat down, grabbed a piece of my toast and started to lay down our plans for the morning between bites.
Bobby's Dad was Greek and Bobby never let an opportunity pass to remind me that the Greeks were cool and that the Romans weren't nothing. When I would remind him that his mother was Italian and that my mother also had Greek blood in her, he'd just pass it off as inconsequential to the present discussion.
As we sat there, Bobby had an evil grin on his face. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the biggest bunch of tangled rubber-bands I had ever seen. Upon closer inspection, these rubber-bands looked different; they were as thick as my index finger and Bobby exclaimed,"Let's make some slingshots!".
The plan was for us to meet Joey down by the Gravelly Run, a creek in the woods near our homes, and look for the best, "Y"-shaped saplings we could find to make our weapons. It was about 8:30 and we had no time to waste. By about 10 o'clock, we each had a fine, precision weapon of defense and destruction to use against teenagers and wild animals and dangerous trees. As it always is with kids and slingshots, we began to perfect out aim and technique. We started with acorns as projectiles. We shot at tree trunks, than at the flowing water, then at frogs, then at each other. Joey shot me in the leg and I bloodied his nose. It was then, probably because of the sight of Joey's blood, that Bobby came up with a brilliant idea.
"Let's go follow the railroad tracks to the 295 Overpass and shoot at the pigeons!", he said.
We all agreed and ran to our homes to get our bikes and start our journey.
The route that we took was up Beverly Drive to the Shop Rite super market. Next to this, was a recently built, strip store with pharmacy, a ladies hair salon and a pizzeria. Both of these structures faced the railroad tracks that we were going to follow towards the town of Barrington, where the Owens-Corning Fiberglass plant was. The cool thing was that, when they built the strip store, they pushed all of the topsoil from the site off to the side in a field which ran parallel to the tracks, leaving lumps and bumps of compacted dirt where the bike path ran. It was the greatest feeling to ride that path; almost like being on a roller-coaster.
As we approached the path heading west, we could see another kid coming in the opposite direction. He had to be at least five years older than we were, by the look of him. He was the shiniest kid I had ever recalled seeing on an English racer. He was wearing a white tee-shirt, white chino slacks and a pair of the whitest, high-top Converse sneakers the world, or at least Magnolia, had ever seen. And, he was coming right at us!
The problem was that I knew Bobby wasn't going to give way. I also knew that I wasn't going to give way and if it were up to Joey, being the psychopath the he was, he probably would've kicked him off of the path as he passed. Bobby was up front and I have never seen him ever lose at Chicken. He quickly turn his head back to look at me and had the biggest smile that could fit comfortably within the confines of his face and then, just as quickly, turned his attention to the task at hand. Then, it happened!
The shiny boy veered off to his right and off of the path onto a down slope of a large bump. He flew over the handlebars onto his right shoulder and squirmed as he slid, coming to a rest about eight feet away. His bike flipped and spun and bounced like a range horse being saddle-broke for the first time until it, too, came to a silent rest in a low shrub. We all stopped our bikes in a line to see and gloat over this magnificent victory. It was then that we all noticed something odd at the same time.
When the kid stood up, we were ready to tear out of there when we saw a huge, brownish-black smear on him that ran from his right shoulder all the way down to his ankle. No only could we see it, we were beginning to smell it, too! The boy stood there a moment, examined the damage, then looked directly at us and with abject terror in his bulging eyes and declared threateningly,"IT'S MUD!"
We looked at each other with our mouths slack-jawed. We weren't going to let him get away with this. We turned to him and screamed in unison, like an orchestral arrangement of the combined voices of the Angels of Heaven, "IT'S SHIT!"
The boy got to his bike, picked it up and walked past us to the path pointed in the direction from which he had come. As he passed, attempting to align the handlebars with the front fork of the bike, we backed off so as not to come in contact with the sorry-looking kid.
He insisted, "It's mud!"
Joey replied,"It don't smell like mud!"
I added,"Your Mom'll tell you if it's mud or not..."
Bobby had to get his in. He looked at the kid as he passed and whispered,"It's shit!"
The boy finally got to the path in front of us, hopped onto his bike and started to peddle. He yelled back to us with the heartfelt conviction of someone who had to have the last word,"It's MUD!"
When he was out of earshot we began discussing what we had just seen. We absolutely had to investigate the scene of this victory. We examined the ruins of one of the greatest pyramids of excrement we had ever seen. Joey asked if it was dog shit. I said that, if it were, it had to be a Saint Bernard to dump that thing and even then it would have been after eating a buffalo. Bobby insisted that it wasn't no dog that left that; it was a Hobo!
"Yup", he said,"A Hobo left his load upon the road and walked away contented!"
I didn't see any toilet paper around and told Bobby so. He said that Hobos don't use toilet paper. They use leaves and paper bags and stuff.
"Well", I said,"I doesn't really matter where the shit came from; shit is shit!"
We were in agreement.
We had forgotten all about the pigeons and had a long, philosophical discussion about things not being what you think they are but what they really are, while walking our bikes home from the Shop Rite parking lot.
This was my first encounter with delusional thinking. Any objective observer would have recognized that that kid was smeared with a foul-smelling, five-inch wide swath of something's droppings; anyone except him, that is. He had the visual and olfactory evidence on his own person and refused to acknowledge reality. And, believe you me; when you're dipped in shit and refuse to see it - that is delusion!
This was not the last time I would encounter delusional thinking during the course of my life. In fact, I believe it is more common and more diffuse than most would believe. Just more delusion, I guess. I have known people whose entire lives were based upon a lie. They continue their journey through life in blissful ignorance of the truth. It is not my job, however, to force these poor souls to see the truth about themselves or the world they live in. I observe and let them be. Who knows, one day they, too, will awaken and see that shit, by any other name, is still shit.
In any case, Bobby joined the U.S. Navy and was kicked out with a Dishonorable Discharge. The last I heard, he was living in Florida. Joey wound up killing a neighbor with a shotgun blast to his chest. He said it was an accident. Knowing Joey, I have my doubts. I don't know if he's in prison, but he was a great candidate. As for the shiny boy on the bike, I still don't know who he was. He's like a ghost that came into our lives that Saturday morning, left an impression and then disappeared. I'd be willing to bet, though, that he's still living in South Jersey and votes democrat!
